Sensing Self or God?

BY SANJEEV VERMA

The religious élan and fervor touches the zenith during the Navratras and I look with an awe at various luminaries of great reasoning and rationale including judges, bureaucrats, technocrats and other professionals, pining to bow before different deities. And more interestingly, ‘they’ want their presence to be well-registered there as well, what to talk about the people in politics. What if they have to use their stature for the same?

Hence, separate entry with escorting staff upto the temple and inside, temple special puja done steadily by pundits. Tens of thousands, standing since hours, can wait for another half an hour.

Also interesting is the manner, others donate at temples and ensure that they are noticed, besides the God, by all and sundry and time and again…..

Some of my personal experiences remind me of one of the famous shayari by Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Galib.

“Sar jhukane se namazein ada nahin hotein,

Dil jhukana parta hai ibadat ke liye,

Ghalib ney es khayal se tor di tasbeh,

Kya gin ke naam loon uska jo behisab deta hey.”

(Prayers can’t be made by bowing your head, you have to stoop your heart to pay obeisance, Ghalib broke away the rosary realizing, should he remember His name by counting(beads) Who showers limitlessly.)

In a visit to Mata Vaishno Devi shrine in Jammu long back, a ceiling fan caught my attention. Staring at the fan I could make out that the donor must have struggled his best to write the family niceties on fan’s blades but might surely have cursed Dr. Schulyer Wheeler (inventor of electric fan) for fixing only three blades to it as one blade bears his name prefixed by Er., second his wife’s prefixed by Dr. and the third one was made duty-bound to bear the names of their two kids. Had there been the fourth blade he could have accommodated his father and mother as well. My eyes could imagine the self-important face of Engineer Sahib hanging to the blades alongwith his family members professing the donated fan, simply ignoring that there was something called aesthetics that he would have been taught to mull over during his professional course.

During another such visit to Baba Balak Nath temple, Deyotsidh (Himachal Pradesh), I found that donors even did not spare marbles used in stairs from engraving their names and addresses. While climbing up the stairs to the holy cave at the top I happened to step upon Goel Ji, Bansal Ji, Sharma Ji, Verma Ji and many more showing no signs of speech or emotion.

Is the ego of a human being so high that it does not spare him from boasting and walking with head held high even at God’s place where he otherwise claims to bow unconditionally?

(The writer, Sanjeev Verma is a correspondent with The Hindustan Times in Chandigarh and can be contacted at sanjeevsdomain@gmail.com)